Last Updated on October 14, 2026 by Karl Thompson
This is a 20-mark Methods in Context question from the 2020 A-level sociology paper, Education with Theory and Methods (7192/1), Question 05. (The paper is dated May 2020, but because of the pandemic it was actually sat in the November 2020 exam series.)
Below I summarise the item and question, give some hints and tips, and then a full answer, followed by what the examiners said about how students answered it.
If you like this sort of thing, you might also like these:
- How to Answer Methods in Context Questions, which explains what the question asks, how it’s marked and how to plan it
- Non-Participant Observation, for the method itself, including structured observation in schools and Ofsted inspections
- Researching in Classrooms, on the practicalities of observing lessons
The Question: Non-participant observation to investigate pupil behaviour in schools (20)
Read Item C below and answer the question that follows.
Item C
Pupils behave in many different ways in schools. Some pupils conform to school rules, for example by wearing the correct uniform and completing tasks set, whilst others break school rules. Interactions between teachers and pupils, and between peers, are likely to influence behaviour.
Sociologists are interested in researching patterns of pupil behaviour, particularly disruptive behaviour. One way of studying pupil behaviour in schools is to use non-participant observation. Pupils are often observed during the course of a school day. One advantage of nonparticipant observation is that the sociologist can observe behaviour both inside and outside classrooms. Non-participant observation allows behaviour categories to be decided before the observation begins. However, behaviour may not be classified in the same way by different researchers.
Applying material from Item C and your knowledge of research methods, evaluate the strengths and limitations of using non-participant observation to investigate pupil behaviour in schools (20).
Hints and Tips: How to Answer…
These questions are METHOD + TOPIC. You need to get in all of the methods material (theoretical, practical and ethical) as a base, and then APPLY the method to the topic, which means USING THE ITEM!
Key points from the item
- pupil behaviour: wearing uniform, completing tasks, breaking rules
- interactions between teachers and pupils, and between peers, influence behaviour
- non-participant observation can be used inside and outside the classroom
- behaviours can be categorised beforehand
- different researchers may not classify behaviour in the same way
Non-participant observation
- Validity: depends on whether it’s overt or covert; you can’t ask questions about meaning, because you’re only observing; and it’s limited to the few types of behaviour you’re looking for.
- Practicality: NOT very practical. In person, the researcher has to be in the classroom, and can’t realistically follow pupils around outside it. They also have to gain access to the school in the first place.
- Representativeness: limited, because one observer can only observe so much.
- Reliability: the observation can be repeated, but only if researchers agree on the categories.
- Ethics: have the pupils (and their parents) consented?
Personally I find it’s easiest to imagine you are going to do the research yourself: put yourself in the shoes of the researcher and think it through…es of the researcher and think it through….
An Answer
Non-Participant Observation (Non-PO) may be a useful way to research pupil behaviours in-school, but practically it will probably only be useful to explore a limited range of behaviours.
Researchers could use Non PO in different classrooms to explore what kind of teaching approaches correlate with positive or negative student behaviours.
For example, a researcher could sit in a classroom and count how many times a teacher praised pupils, how much time they devote to teacher-led compared to student-led learning, and how much time they spend helping students with the later, and see if this is correlated with higher student engagement in terms of less off-task chatter, more completion of tasks, or even test results if done in the lesson.
If you did the research in league with the school you could focus on the same students and their behaviour responses in different teaching environments, and with different peers in their different subjects, this could be very scientific and favoured by positivists.
This kind of comparative approach would require the researcher to know what they are looking for in the first place, and to be able to quantify their findings they would need appropriate activity and behaviour grids to record data into.
In terms of validity, a problem may be that pupil behaviour may be different with a researcher present within the classroom. For this reason, filming a class may improve validity, although ethically students and ideally parents and teachers would have to be informed of this in advance to gain consent.
One observer may also miss out on some pupil behaviour in larger classes, they simply may not be able to see everything going on in a class of say 30 pupils, and for this reason filming may again be useful to go back and observe again. Filming would also allow for a second research to check findings, improving reliability.
The item mentions that different researchers may not categorise behaviour in the same way, this is a problem which could reduce reliability, especially if researchers are from different ethnic or class backgrounds, or different genders. Women may be less likely to see bad behaviour of girls, for example, and the same for men with boys, unconscious researcher bias may reduce validity and thus reliability. However as mentioned above, filming observations in classrooms could be a way to overcome this, different researchers can watch the same footage and come to an agreement around how to categorise behaviours.
Practically non-PO is not very practical, researchers would have to gain access to the school, and classrooms, teachers and pupils would probably not be very keen. In terms of representatives you would be limited to one class at a time, and one hours work of in-class observations would have to be written up and checked afterwards. If you wanted to research across different schools, access would have to be negotiated for each school.
The item mentions doing non PO outside of the classroom, the problem here is that if you’re doing this in corridors, playgrounds, or social spaces, there would be a lot of coming and going of different students, so you wouldn’t be able to focus on particular students, as you could do with being in a classroom.
This kind of outside the classroom would be messier than in-classroom, and to be honest i don’t know what you’d be looking for, maybe just open ended observation would yield something useful, but I can’t really see the point? Maybe you could use this to measure general rowdiness in different schools and see if this is correlated with staff presence (but the answer here seems obvious?). On reflection there seems little to gain from doing this.
Less structured non PO outside of classrooms would also be more subject to the subjectivities of the researchers.
One other way of doing non participant observation may be to set cameras up in corridors and school gates, these could measure things like student lateness, and maybe other things with the right AI software, but of course AI software has to be programmed which means that is open to human bias too.
Weaknesses of non-PO would be that you can’t ask students WHY they are doing what they are doing, so you wouldn’t have any in-depth information from participants.
This also raises ethical problems in that non-PO done on its own would be researching without any say-so from the participants, treating them like guinea pigs, and this method is in some ways like a field-experiment. This method thus wouldn’t be favoured by interpretivists.
One final thing is that OFSTED inspections and school internal observations offer a secondary source of non-PO data that could form the basis of further non-PO work, findings from either of these could be used as a jumping off point for further research.
For example previous internal school observations may have found that, for example, Kahoot works really well to engage students, so further observations could see if this is true in a wider range of subjects, or if IT more generally improves student performance.
In conclusion I think non PO is a useful method for exploring correlations of specific behaviours within classrooms, but must have a narrow focus to be useful. i can’t see how it would be useful doing more general observations outside of the classroom, it would be too impractical and too open to the subjective whims of the researchers to yield anything useful I think.
What the examiners said
The AQA’s report on this exam series made three main points about this question. In summary:
- Many students wrote about observation in general rather than non-participant observation specifically. Weaker answers paid little attention to the “non-participant” part, compared covert and overt observation instead, and some wrongly claimed that non-participant observation is always covert.
- Many answers made generic points about researching in schools, such as getting past gatekeepers, which could have applied to any method. Stronger answers tied these access problems to observation specifically.
- Few answers applied the method to pupil behaviour itself. The examiners’ example of a point that does: an outside observer may struggle to understand the meanings younger pupils give to their behaviour within pro-school or anti-school subcultures.
The lesson is the same as for every Methods in Context question: know the specific method, not just the general family it belongs to, and keep tying it back to the topic in the question.
Sources and signposting
- AQA 7192/1 question paper (November 2020 series)
- Mark scheme for the paper
- AQA examiners’ report (November 2020)
- Methods in Context topics on the research methods page
- More Methods in Context questions
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